DOI: 10.1177/0263276413506019 Society: Social Theory and ... Articles/2014_Alexander_The...the...

Theory, Culture & Society

2014, Vol 31(1) 3–24

! The Author(s) 2013

Reprints and permissions:

sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0263276413506019

tcs.sagepub.com

Article

The Fate of theDramatic in ModernSociety: Social Theoryand the TheatricalAvant-Garde

Jeffrey C AlexanderYale University, USA

Abstract

Avant-garde theatre is often invoked as the bellwether for a society that has become

postdramatic – fragmented, alienated, and critical of efforts to create collectively

shared meanings. A theatre whose sequenced actions have no narrative (so the story

goes) mirrors a social world where the most conflictual situations no longer appear

as drama but merely as spectacle: a society where audiences look on without any

feeling or connection. Because only half right, these theses about postdramatic the-

atre and society are fundamentally wrong. As modern societies have expanded and

differentiated, the elements that compose performances have become separated and

often fragmented in both theatre and society. If they can be brought back together

again, performances are viewed as authentic and meaningful. If (re)fusion cannot be

achieved, performances fail to communicate meaning. The aim of this essay is to

demonstrate that a shared ambition to (re)fuse fragmented performative elements

has defined the most important strain of avant-garde theatre over the last two

centuries. Most radical theatrical innovation has sought to open live drama back

up to the telos of myth and ritual. Neither in theatre nor social life can the world

transcend dramaturgy; it is fundamental to the search for meaning in a world beyond

cosmological religion.

Keywords

avant-garde, cultural sociology, dramaturgy, narrative, performance, poetics,

spectacle

Corresponding author:

Jeffrey C Alexander, Yale University, PO Box 208265, 140 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06520–2865,

USA.

Email: [email protected]

http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/

This was the joke. [You] got out a metro Boston phone book andtore a White Pages page out at random and thumbtacked it to thewall and . . . throw a dart at it from across the room . . . . And thename it hit becomes the subject of the Found Drama. And whateverhappens to the protagonist with the name you hit with the dart forlike the next hour and a half is the Drama . . . . You do whatever youwant during the Drama. You’re not there. Nobody knows what thename in the book’s doing . . . . The joke’s theory was there’s noaudience and no director and no stage or set because . . . in Realitythere are none of these things. And the protagonist doesn’t knowhe’s the protagonist in a Found Drama because in Reality nobodythinks they’re in any sort of Drama. (David Foster Wallace, InfiniteJest (2009: note 145: 1027–1028))

Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006 [1999]) has recently conceptualized a move-ment to the ‘postdramatic’ that eerily resembles the joke about FoundDrama that David Foster Wallace spins in Infinite Jest. Examining astream of contemporary avant-garde theatrical productions for evidenceof dramatic practice and theory, Lehmann announces the end of theatre aswe know it. The Aristotelian format of drama has been displaced, hedeclares, and theatre has moved on to the next evolutionary phase. Weare now in the era of postdramatic happenings, staged projects with nodiscernible plots or written texts, peopled by characters devoid of internalemotional life. Drama now consists of simple projections of bodilymovements; stages filled with isolated and opaque iconic objects; tempor-ally sequenced actions without meaningful connection; and theatricalscenes that unfold simultaneously and cacophonously, whose presentationis shot through by such non-theatrical art forms as music, sculpture, orpainting.

Rather than dramatic representations, written texts, theatrical lineage,and social languages that make staged performance intelligible, in con-temporary theatre, Lehmann claims, ‘the moment of speaking becomeseverything’ (2006: 76). Rather than a ‘temporal, dynamic formation’generating suspense, theatre becomes simply serial ‘occurrences’ (2006:133). Rather than audiences sharing interpretations and forging commonfeelings into emergent ‘community’, there is now mere ‘heterogeneity’(2006: 132–3). Rather than a ‘warming’ contact between actor and audi-ence, the interface has become ‘cold’. Not only is contemporary theatre‘detached from all religious and cultic reference’ – a separation thatdefined modern drama for centuries – but ‘the whole spectrum of move-ments and processes that no referent’ (2006: 69) at all. Instead of mean-ingfully organized mise-en-scene, the scenes of postdramatic theatrepossess simply ‘heightened precision’ (2006: 69).

4 Theory, Culture & Society 31(1)

Lehmann sees convergence between the postdramatic in theatre andperformance art. Performance art not only joins postwar aesthetics inchallenging the equation of art with the beautiful or sublime; it rejects thevery notion of a fixed, final, and material product. Presenting itself as analternative to ‘pictorial or object-like presentations of reality through theaddition of the dimension of time’, performance art, like postdramatictheatre, emphasizes ‘duration, momentariness, simultaneity, and unre-peatability’ (2006: 134). Rather than appealing to the restrained eye ofthe connoisseur, performance art seeks to mobilize a mass audience bydrawing them, sometimes wittingly but more often not, into the per-formative process itself (2006: 134–5; cf. Muse, 2010).

On the basis of these putative developments in contemporary aestheticpractice, Lehmann believes he has discovered a new aesthetic foundationfor critical social theory. The postdramatic in art, he claims, crystallizes adangerous shift in real social life: there has been a ‘dwindling of thedramatic space of imagination in the consciousness of society’ (2006:182). The ‘form of experience’ has become so degraded that ‘dramaand society cannot come together’ (2006: 181). In contemporary society,‘the most conflictual situations will no longer appear as drama’ (2006:182). In the ‘de-dramatized reality’ of contemporary society, ‘real issuesare only decided as power blocs’ (2006: 182). We are left with the societyof the spectacle, the world Guy Debord and the Situationists described inthe ’60 s and Jean Baudrillard elaborated as simulacra for decades after.‘All human experiences (life, eroticism, happiness, recognition) are tied tocommodities’ (2006: 183), Lehmann laments, and the ‘citizen spectator’can ‘only look on’ (2006: 184) without any feeling of connection to theworld around her. Sharing neither meaning, ethic, or experience with thepowers who stage social performances, citizens of the spectacle societyare impotent to affect them.1

In this plaidoyer I take issue with this idea of the postdramatic, notonly as it applies to the theatre, but also to social life. My claim is neitherthat such Found Drama is nonexistent, nor that such social spectaclesnever appear. My contention is more systemic, more theoretical. I arguethat instead of seeing dramatic declension, we must see dramatic vari-ation. Instead of being viewed as the newest phase in aesthetic evolution,the postdramatic, in both aesthetic and social theory, should be concep-tualized in terms of the variables that establish conditions for performa-tive failure – and success. Postdramatic experience is powerful,sometimes dangerous, and occasionally liberating. It is not, however,endemic to contemporary theatrical and social life; we are not experien-cing an infinite regress to the postdramatic. As societies have grown moreinstitutionally differentiated, culturally reflexive, and fragmented, theat-ricality has changed, as have the performative processes that extendbeyond the stage into real social life (Alexander, 2011). Lehmann isright to correlate the two, but he has connected them in exactly the

Alexander 5

wrong way. Over the course of historical time, the elements that composeperformance have gradually become separated and specialized, both intheatre and society. With this defusion, the possibility that dramaticefforts might fail to communicate meaning has increased. Postdramadescribes a condition of deflation, one in which dramatic performancefails to make strong meaning for either a part of an audience or itsentirety; sometimes this failure to make meaning even extends to thosewho are creating the drama. However, deflationary symbols can be dra-matically reinflated; cultural differentiation causes severe strains, but itmust not be conflated with devolution.

I develop this alternative perspective on drama and society by exam-ining critical turning points in the emergence of Western theatre. Myevidence is drawn from avant-garde playwrights, actors, directors, anddesigners who have shifted the shape of drama’s currents, and the critics,philosophers, and contemporary theatre theorists who have commentedupon this shape-shifting in turn. In this regard I take a particularly closelook at recent developments in performance studies.

I

In the course of the last three centuries, theatrical practice and theoryhave been defined by anxieties about performative defusion (Alexander,2011). Lehmann’s embrace of the postdramatic is one recent response tothis anxiety, but hardly the first. In the early decades of the last century,Bertolt Brecht (2000 [1937]) conceptualized an ‘alienation effect’(Verfremdungseffekt) as an antidote to Aristotelian drama, which heregarded not only as increasingly burdensome to sustain, but politicallyoppressive as well. It is too ‘difficult and taxing’, Brecht complained, forthe actor ‘to conjure up particular inner moods or emotions night afternight’ (2000: 457). As an alternative, the left-wing German playwrightand director suggested that stage actors cultivate not naturalness butartificiality. If actors would merely ‘exhibit the outer signs . . .whichaccompany emotions’, rather than trying to project inner feelings them-selves, then the ‘automatic transfer of emotions to the spectator’ (2000:457) will be blocked and the audience ‘hindered from simply identifyingitself with the characters in the play’ (2000: 453). With Aristotelian cath-arsis thus prevented, the viewer’s ‘acceptance or rejection’ of theatrical‘actions and utterances’ could now ‘take place on a conscious plane,instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious’ (2000: 453).Even if such an experience of alienation failed in its aim of freeing work-ers from bourgeois ideology, Brecht believed, ‘acting like this is healthierand . . . less unworthy of a thinking being’ (2000: 457). Three decadeslater, the revolutionary Brazilian dramatist Augusto Boal (2000 [1974])responded to theatrical and social complexity in the same way. Boalattacked Aristotelian drama as a ‘powerful system of intimidation’, a


‘coercive system’ (2000: 470) that ‘functions to diminish, placate, satisfy[and] eliminate all that is not commonly acceptable’ (2000: 471).

Lehmann’s postdramatic manifesto, then, is actually nothing new. Itdiffers from his predecessors’ programs only in its rejection of the possi-bility of socialist salvation. The call for moving beyond the dramaticconstitutes one line of the modern theatrical avant-garde, but there isanother stream that has continued to embrace an eschatological hope fordrama’s revitalization. It is this other line that I intend to reconstruct, toplace inside the longue duree of theatrical history and to connect withsocial theorizing about the modern condition.

The postdramatic pushes defusion to its limit condition, trying to getbeyond meaning and telos by thoroughly shattering any linkage amongthe elements of performance. The other avant-garde response pointsaway from this post condition to the (re)dramatic, confronting the con-ditions of defusion with never-before-conceived-of efforts to overcomethem. The (re)dramatic seeks to reforge links among performative elem-ents, conceptualizing and practicing theatre in a manner that opens itback up to the telos of myth and the seamlessness of ritual. ‘In theanguished, catastrophic period we live in’, Antonin Artaud (2000[1938]) announced, ‘we feel an urgent need for a theatre which eventsdo not exceed, whose resonance is deep within us, dominating theinstability of our times’ (2000: 435). Rather than striving for alienationand spectacle, Artaud declares, ‘I cannot conceive of a work of art asdistinct from life’ (2000: 433). He calls for ‘a theatre that wakes us up:nerves and heart’, a theatre that ‘inspires us with the fiery magnetism ofits image and acts upon us like a spiritual therapeutics whose touch cannever be forgotten’ (2000: 435). Jacques Copeau NIR (1955 [1923]) mayemploy the term spectacle, but he meant it to suggest fullness and fusion,not emptiness and defusion; spectacle allows us to envision a theatrical‘audience brought together by need, desire, aspiration, for experiencingtogether human emotions by means of spectacle more fully realized thanlife itself’ (in Auslander, 1997: 16).

The (re)dramatic and re-fusing avant-garde of the early 20th centurylimed Nietzsche’s call for restoring ritual to drama, a call that looked notonly to Wagner’s project of opera as total art form but earlier still to thewellsprings of Romanticism itself. These (re)dramatic currents also pulsethrough the contemporary theatrical avant-garde in numerous permuta-tions, including Jerzy Grotowski’s (2002 [1968]) widely reverberating callfor the creation of a ‘sacred’, ‘pure’, and ‘holy’ theatre of ‘trance’ and‘transillumination’, where ‘the body vanishes and burns’ and ‘the spec-tator sees only a series of visible impulses’ (2002: 15–34); in Peter Brook’s(1968) living theatre, where audiences ‘have seen the face of the invisiblethrough an experience on the stage that transcended their experience inlife’ (1968: 42); and in such other experimental theatre projects as JosephChaikin’s (1972) open theatre.

Alexander 7

II

Four decades ago, in the person of Wooster Group dramatist RichardSchechner, this (re)dramatic, re-fusing theatrical avant-garde connectedwith social theory in the person of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner(Schechner, 1988). The upshot was the new discipline that may be con-ceived as fundamentally challenging the idea of the postdramatic.Schechner aimed not to deflate theatricality but to reinflate and extendit. He demonstrated how theatrical homologues – ‘performances’ – alsopermeate non-theatrical, but dramatic, social life. Famously drawing therelationship between social ritual and theatrical drama as an intertwinedfigure eight, Schechner actually made use of avant-garde theatre theoryto colonize social life (Schechner, 2002 [1982]: 68, passim). Generationsof theatre scholars after Schechner have deepened his investigations ofdramatic effect, creating a body of richly suggestive if also deeply contra-dictory studies. Peggy Phelan (1993) believes, for example, that only liveperformances are real and affecting, while Shalom Auslander (1997)attacks liveness as a false and misleading ideal. Diana Taylor (2003)separates written, formal ‘archives’ from acted out ‘repertoires’, high-lighting the importance of ‘scenarios’ that may be cultural structuresbut are not texts. Joseph Roach (2007) extols the symbolic vitality of‘it-ness’, breaking down the barrier between profane commodity andsacred symbol in performances stretching from fashion to cinema. JillDolan (2005) reinstates the division, insisting that ‘mesmerizing momentsare what those of us addicted to performance live for’ (2005: 8). Heranalytic interests focus on performances whereby ‘suddenly and unex-pectedly we are lifted from our normal detached contemplation intoanother place, where time stops, and our breath catches’ (2005: 8).

As the new discipline of performance studies came into its own twodecades ago, it came under harsh attack from William Worthen, a tex-tually-minded theatre theorist. Worthen (1995) accused performance stu-dies of a ‘romantic sentimentality’ that constructed false dichotomies, of‘urgently’ contrasting the ‘supposedly liberating “textuality” of perform-ance’ – ‘transgressive, multiform, [and] revisionist’ – with the ‘domain ofthe text’ conceived as ‘dominant, repressive, conventional, and canonical’(1995: 14). Declaring this a false choice, Worthen suggested that themodel of theatrical text as unified, intentional, and didactic had beenthoroughly rejected by 20th-century literary theory from the NewCriticism to Deconstruction.

The letter of Worthen’s attack on the romantic binarism of perform-ance studies is largely correct (cf. Alexander and Mast, 2006).Performance studies scholars tend to confound the analytical and thenormative, romantically championing the vigor of drama against atired, thin, dried out theatrical text. Not only is their writing frequentlymoralistic, but their concepts are often metaphorical, more suggestive of


poetics than social theory. Coming to praise performance, not to bury it,scholars in this new discipline have resisted the variability of performancein the age of defusion; as a result, they have failed to theorize the con-ditions that explain it.

Yet, Worthen missed the forest for the trees.2 The intellectual achieve-ment of performance studies has been to ‘secularize’ the (re)dramaticavant-garde, to ‘think’ it rather than do it, and their decades of reflexivityhas created a signal opening for social theory. If we bring this new dis-cipline to bear on the earlier conceptual innovations of Kenneth Burke,Erving Goffman, and Clifford Geertz, and synthesize them with contem-porary cultural sociology, it becomes possible to develop a meaning-oriented but ‘culturally-pragmatic’ theory of social performances(Alexander, 2011). Stimulated by the analytics of performance theory,culturally-oriented social theory has found new ways to think aboutsymbolic action, cultural structure and contingency, social conflict andsolidarity, social criticism, and political responsibility. As a result, wehave better understood how the relative autonomy of culture allowssocial actors not only to imagine but to dramatize hopes for a better life.

The dangers of modernity cannot be blamed on the instrumentalreason of postdramatic and commodified spectacles (Alexander, 2013).To the contrary, social evils have been driven by cultural-cum-emotionalmovements of immense performative power. In modern, modernizing,and postmodern societies, for better and for worse, social dramas arehere to stay. It is not only that social life cannot get beyond the dramatic,but that it should not try. Four decades ago, Raymond Williams insistedthat societies still need the dramatization of consciousness:

We live in a society which is at once more mobile and more com-plex, and therefore, in some crucial respects, relatively moreunknowable, relatively more opaque than most societies of thepast, and yet which is also more insistently pressing [and]penetrating. . . . The clear public order of much traditional dramahas not, for many generations, been available to us[,] [but] presen-tation, representation, signification have never been more import-ant. Drama broke from fixed signs, established its permanentdistance from myth and ritual and from the hierarchical figuresand processions of state. . . .But drama, which separated, did notseparate out altogether. . . .Beyond what many people can see as thetheatricality of our image-conscious public world, there is a moreserious, more effective, more deeply rooted drama: the dramatiza-tion of consciousness itself. (Williams, 1983 [1974]: 13–18)

Drama is fundamental to the search for meaning and solidarity in apost-ritual world. How else can meaning and mythos be sustained when

Alexander 9

the metaphysics of cosmological religion has broken down and rituals aresporadic and incomplete? Drama displaces yet also encompasses shredsof the pre-modern religious order. Converting cosmos into text, dramaprojects powerful narratives in which protagonists and antagonists fightagainst one another’s vision of the good and the right. Identifying withthese characters, audiences connect with meanings outside themselvesand reflectively work through their moral implications; they learnabout heroes and enemies, make epiphanies out of historical events,and experience solidarity with others by sharing catharsis (Baker,2010). Theatre crystallizes and concentrates these processes in a reflex-ively aesthetic idiom, but the dramatic form permeates the entirety ofmodern social life.3 Without drama, collective and personal meaningscould not be sustained, evil could not be identified, and justice wouldbe impossible to obtain.

III

Before theatre, when there was cosmos and ritual, the pragmatics ofsocial performance were relatively simple. After the emergence of theatre,in the post-cosmological world of complexity and defusion, social per-formances become extraordinarily difficult. If social theory is to under-stand and conceptualize these difficulties, it must examine how dramatictechniques in theatre and society not only separate and shape the elem-ents of performance, but seek to put them back together again.

The Emergence of Text

While Aristotle ostensibly addresses drama, he is actually explaining theconstruction of poetic text. ‘Our subject being poetry, I propose to speakof the structure of plot required for a good poem’, he explains, and ‘ofthe number and nature of the constitutive parts of a poem’ (2000: 45).With this intra-textual focus, Aristotle illuminates such narrative struc-tures as tragedy and comedy, making use of them to predict dramaticeffects.4 The closest he comes to the pragmatics of performance, however,is advising poets to put themselves imaginatively into the place of theaudience:

At the time when he is constructing his Plots, and engaged in theDiction in which they are worked out, the poet should remember (1)to put the actual scenes as far as possible before his eyes. In thisway, seeing everything with the vividness of an eyewitness as it were,he will devise what is appropriate, and be least likely to overlookincongruities . . . . (2) As far as may be, too, the poet should even acthis theory out with the very gestures of his personages. . . .Distress


and anger, for instance, are portrayed most truthfully by one who isfeeling them at the moment. (Aristotle, 2000: 59)

Two thousand years later, when theatre once again emerged fromreligious ritual, one finds the same intra-textual focus in PierreCorneille’s (2000 [1660]) introductions to his collected plays, undergirdedby similar faith that theatrical success is guaranteed by the written coher-ence of a play. Stressing how drama unites action, time, and place, theclassical French playwright insists that, properly constructed, the text ofa play so subordinates the other elements of theatrical performance thatany possible contingency in presentation or interpretation is suppressed.‘There must be only one complete action’, Corneille advises, ‘whichleaves the mind of the spectator serene’ (2000: 155). Acknowledging‘that action can be complete only through several others’, and thatthese others may be ‘less than perfect’, he asserts, nonetheless, that ifsuch peripheral actions can be made to appear ‘as preparation’ for thecentral one, then they will succeed in ‘keep[ing] the spectator in a pleasantsuspense’ (2000: 155). Maintaining the appearance of smooth and flow-ing continuity is everything, the realities of character and the contingen-cies of action unimportant. ‘It is not necessary that we know exactly whatthe actors are doing in the intervals which separate the acts’, Corneilleexplains, only ‘that they contribute to the action when they appear onstage’ (2000: 155–6).

A poet is not required to show all the particular actions which bringabout the particular one; he must choose to show those which arethe most advantageous whether by the beauty of the spectacle or bythe brilliance or violence of the passions they produce . . . and tohide the others behind the scene while informing the spectator ofthem by a narration or some other artistic device. . . .He shouldinvolve himself as little as possible with things which have happenedbefore the action he is presenting. Such narrations are annoying,usually because they are not expected, and they disturb the mind ofthe spectators. (Corneille, 2000: 156, 158)

The Independent Audience

However, even as Corneille penned these intra-textual reassurances, pri-vate theatres began displacing both public and aristocratic performancespaces. With the decline of theatrical patronage, the rise of drama mar-kets, and the explosion of revolutionary social conflict, the serene confi-dence of playwrights in the illocutionary effect of their rhetorical wilesfaded. Fictional stage world and audience were becoming more clearlydistinct (Bennett, 1997: 3ff.). Stalls replaced pits, and footlights – first

Alexander 11

installed in private theatres in the 17th century – placed a newly materialbarrier between audience and stage. Theatrical texts now confrontedaudiences in a literal way, and it became ever more difficult to ensurethat the newly-enfranchised masses, both working and middle class, werestimulated and pleased. In the early decades of the 19th century, audi-ences were raucous. By mid-century, they had become more staid.‘Behavior improved’, Booth suggests, ‘and complaints were eventuallymade not of uproar in the pit and gallery, but of stolid indifference in thestalls’ (in Bennett, 1997: 3). Now less attentive, the audience came to beconceptualized as theatre’s ‘fourth wall’, not only concretely but meta-phorically removed from the supposed-to-be meaningful and affectingtext enacted upon the stage. Trying desperately to become a playwright,but failing, Henry James (1936 [1889]) laid the blame squarely on theshoulders of the audience, ignoring the awkwardness of his own dramatictechnique. His voice dripping with sarcasm, the American novelist lam-basted ‘the essentially brutal nature of the modern audience’ (1936: 66):

The omnium gatherum of the population of a big commercial city atthe hour of the day when their taste is at its lowest, flocking out ofhideous hotels and restaurants, gorged with food, stultified withbuying and selling and with all the other sordid preoccupations ofthe age, squeezed together in a sweltering mass, disappointed intheir sets, timing the author, wishing to get their money back onthe spot – all before eleven o’clock! Fancy putting the exquisitebefore such a tribunal as that! . . .The dramatist . . .has to makethe basest concessions. One of his principal canons is that hemust enable his spectators to catch the suburban trains, whichstop at 11:30. (James, 1936 [1889]: 66–7)5

As brilliantly as James mastered the novelistic text, he could not trans-late it into a script that could walk and talk upon the stage.

With the audience emerging as an independent, contingently respon-sive element of theatre, Brecht’s later political admonitions can be seennot only as normative but analytical, his aesthetic techniques thematizingthe social withdrawal of identification and affect from the stage. ButDerrida understood that ‘alienation only consecrates, with didacticinsistence and systematic heaviness, the non-participation of specta-tors . . . in the creative act, in the irruptive [sic] forces fissuring the spaceof the stage’ (in States, 1985: 113). As Sinfield suggests, every ‘artisticform depends upon some readiness in the receiver to cooperate with itsaims and conventions’ (in Bennett, 1997: 4). But if the audience wasalways already there, only relatively recently has it been conceptualizedin such a way that it becomes orthogonal to the performance, an autono-mous element. Still, even the most politically radical theatre depends on


the readiness of an audience to subscribe. ‘Even in Brecht’, Bert States(1985) points out, ‘everything seeks its own illusory level’ (1985: 94), hisdramatic success relying on the audience’s ‘willingness to vibrate in tunewith . . .whatever the work may be up to’ (1985: 104). Just as Boal (2000[1974]) follows Brecht in the fight with Aristotle, so he, too, insists, inspite of himself, that the fourth wall, ‘built by the ruling classes’ (2000:471), can and must be torn down. ‘Spectator is a bad word’, Boal com-plains, for it makes the viewer into ‘less than a man [sic]’ (2000: 473).Calling for a new theatre of the oppressed, this self-avowed critic ofcatharsis hoped drama would inspire hopes for political triumph andrestore the proletariat’s ‘capacity as an actor’ (2000: 473).

In literary criticism, reader-response theory addressed the splitbetween text and audience more analytically. Stanley Fish (1980) goesso far as to suggest that ‘interpretive communities’ – audiences, in the-atrical terms – actually create their own texts in the act of reading (cf.Chaudhuri, 1984). Avant-garde dramatists devoted themselves to explor-ing ways of breaking through the fourth wall, creating the theory andpractice of internally emotive acting, entraining scripts, iconic props, andmagnetic directing. Sometimes they even try to overcome the audience byaddressing it directly (Ridout, 2006: 70). If they shock and offend viewers(so the argument goes) perhaps they can fuse them with their own texts atthe same time. This line of reasoning informs Peter Handke’s 1966 intro-ductory diatribe in Offending the Audience:

Here you won’t receive your due. Your curiosity is not satisfied. Nospark will leap across from us to you. You will not be electrified . . . .This world is no different from yours. You are no longer eavesdrop-pers. You are the subject matter [and] this is no mirage. You won’tsee walls that tremble . . . . This stage represents nothing . . . . Youdon’t see a darkness that pretends to be another darkness. Youdon’t see a brightness that pretends to be another brightness . . . .You don’t hear any noise that pretends to be another noise. Youdon’t see a room that pretends to be another room. Here you arenot experiencing a time that pretends to be another time . . . . Thefront of the stage is not a line of demarcation . . . . It is no demar-cation line as long as we are speaking to you. . . . There is no radi-ation belt between you and us. (Handke, 1971: 15–16)

Dramatically inclined democratic theorists have turned to the inde-pendence of the audience to rescue rationality from theatrical artifice.In his paean to the ‘emancipated spectator’, Jacques Ranciere (2009)praises the one who ‘observes, selects, compares, interprets’, who ‘linkswhat she sees to a host of other things that she has seen on other stages,in other kinds of place’, who ‘composes her own poem with the elements

Alexander 13

of the poem before her’ and ‘participates in the performance by refash-ioning it in her own way’ (2009: 13). In such efforts to do away with thecontingency of theatrical life, political philosophy echoes the aestheticambitions of the theatrical avant-garde.

From the dawning 19th-century revelation of the fateful gap betweendramatic text and audience, everything else flowed. Between the hammerof text and the anvil of audience there emerged every subsequent theat-rical and conceptual innovation, each conceived as a crucible for forginga new performative fusion.

The Actor Steps Out

The transformation of acting presents the most widely reflected upon ofthe innovations I have in mind. In the late 18th century, Diderot (2000[1773–8]) praised the actor as an ‘unmoved and disinterested onlooker’,all ‘penetration and no sensibility’, who had ‘mastered the art of mimick-ing everything’ (2000: 198). For the Enlightenment, in other words, textwas still king. Asking ‘What, then, is truth on stage?’, Diderot answers:‘It is the conformity of action, diction, face, voice, movement, and ges-ture, to an ideal model imagined by the poet’ (2000: 201). By the begin-ning of the 20th century, by contrast, the British wunderkind GordonCraig (2000 [1907]) denounced the very idea of the actor as merely a‘photo-machine’ (2000: 394), issuing a clarion call for the emancipationof actors as independent sources of creativity in their own right: ‘Todaythey impersonate and interpret; tomorrow they must represent and inter-pret; and on the third day they must create’ (2000: 394).

It was, indeed, only at the beginning of the last century that actortraining became a self-conscious craft (Hodge, 2000). The point of thisnew discipline was to wake up the dead text, to make it stand tall, to walkand talk. David Krasner (2000) describes what happened in the 1920swhen Constantin Stanislavski’s ideas about actor training migrated tothe United States. In the hands of such teachers as Lee Strasberg, StellaAdler, and Sanford Meisner, the so-called ‘method’ transformed actingon stage and screen. Acting moved from being ‘outside in’ – from text toactor – to being ‘inside out’, allowing the actor to have an independenteffect on the understanding of the text. Instead of merely ‘indicating’emotions, actors now tried actually to experience them. Instead of man-nerism, actors were instructed to project an ‘unassuming natural pres-ence’. Instead of grand theatricality, performances should look like ‘realbehavior’. During rehearsals, actors were pushed to get away from textsentirely, to engage in improvisation, to speak gibberish, to paraphrase,and to engage in mindlessly repetitive expression, exercises designed totrigger actors’ personal interpretations so that their emotions couldbecome independent of the playwright’s printed words. Strasberg encour-aged the ‘Personal Moment’ in rehearsals. Recalling and acting out


excruciating or exhilarating moments from the actors’ personal pasts,Strasberg suggests, is a technique that ‘releases the actor from any obli-gations to a text or . . . to an audience’. Method acting was hardlydesigned to appear methodical. Theatre can become dramatic, accordingto Krasner, only if actors ‘accomplish the experience of real feelings’,working ‘moment-to-moment on impulse, talking and listening as if theevents on stage are actually happening in the immediate present’(Krasner, 2000: 146).

In the postwar period, Grotowski (2002 [1968]) carried forward thepractical tradition of making acting the center of theatrical success.‘The personal and scenic techniques of the actor’, he proclaimed, are‘at the core of theatre art’ (2002: 15ff.). The text by itself is useless,Grotowski insists: ‘In the development of theatrical art, the text wasone of the last elements to be added’. Indeed, compared with the signifi-cance of acting, the other elements of performance are virtually useless aswell. ‘By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous, we foundthat theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume andscenography, without a separate performance area (stage), without light-ing and sound effects.’ What theatre ‘cannot exist’ without is ‘the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, “live” communion’ (2002:19). Schechner once asked the Polish director what he meant by theadmonition, ‘Don’t play the text’. Grotowski responded:

If the actor wants to play the text, he is doing what’s easiest. Thetext has been written [and] he frees himself from the obligation ofdoing anything himself. But if . . . he unmasks this lack of personalaction and reaction, [t]hen the actor is obliged to refer to himselfwithin his own context and to find his own line of impulses . . . . Theproblem is always the same: stop the cheating, find the authenticimpulses. The goal is to find a meeting between the text and theactor. (Schechner, 2002 [1982]: 249–50)

As States (1985: 132, 125) explains, there is no ‘privileged voice’ intheatre. In contrast with the opportunities for authorial intervention inprose and poetry, in theatre there can be only the ‘objective presence ofan illusion’, and such an ‘aura’ can be created only by ‘an actor’s aware-ness of his own self-sufficiency’. Chaikin’s ‘Living Theatre’ famouslyorganized an ensemble that created theatrical texts through their owncollaborative performance. He wrote The Presence of the Actor to explainits success: ‘All the history of theatre refers to actors who possess thispresence’ (Chaikin, 1972: 20). Roach (2007) explores it-ness to examinethe same thing – ‘the quality that makes you feel as though you’re stand-ing right next to the actor, no matter where you’re sitting in the theatre’(Chaikin, 1972: 20).

Alexander 15

Producers, Directors, and Props Emerge

It was in response to the same kinds of performative challenges thatproducing and directing emerged as specialized roles. Creators of theatreneeded to focus on seducing the audience. When powerful playwrightsbecame producers, they hired actors, organized complex productions andpromotional campaigns, and gauged the affective power of performancesthrough trial runs and later by means of surveys and focus groups.Armed with this information, they demanded that playwrights rewriteagain and again, hoping to narrow the gap between text and audience byopening night. Preparing for the opening of Fool for Love, Sam Shepardhad the theatre’s walls wired for reverberation and speakers placed underthe theatre’s seats (Bennet, 1997: 142).

The same challenges triggered the emergence of directing, whichallowed a new focus on what came to be called mise-en-scene. Untilthe late 19th century, the tasks of acting, producing, and staging hadbeen bundled together in the role of theatrical entrepreneur, a figuretypically of large personality who sometimes actually wrote the text, aswell. Directing became an independent theatrical role in the course ofbitter struggles against producers, money men, and actors. BernardDort’s (1982) historical reconstruction describes how the stage manageraccepted elements of performance as set in stone, seeking to maintain thepre-existing theatrical order. When the director emerged, his conceptioncould not have been more different. The director ‘doesn’t accept theseelements as they are [but] sets to work before the elements of productionhave been determined’. Seeing himself as the real ‘author of the perform-ance’, the director ‘wants to be recognized as its creator’ (1982: 63–4). Itwas a long struggle. As late as the 1930s, Artaud (2000 [1938]) wasbemoaning that directors played ‘second fiddle to the author’, proclaim-ing ‘it is essential to put an end to the subjugation of the theatre to thetext’ (2000: 442). Artaud felt compelled to dispute the idea of the directoras ‘slave’, as ‘merely an artisan, adaptor, a kind of translator eternallydevoted to making a dramatic work pass from one language to another’(2000: 442). If ‘the language of literature’ is to be revived, the directormust be allowed to ‘create in complete autonomy’, for his ‘domain iscloser to life than the author’s’ (2000: 442).

By mid-century, the director’s controlling authority was more firmly inplace. ‘What makes movies a great popular art form’, Pauline Kael(1968: 196) wrote in her homage to Orson Welles, ‘is that certain artistscan, at moments in their lives, reach out and unify the audience – edu-cated and uneducated – in a shared response’. The distinctive intellectualcontribution of French New Wave auteur theory placed directors, notstar actors, at the core of cinematic power. It was to protest this newlypreeminent element of performance that, in the early 1980s, the Germantheatre theorist Dort (1982) turned Artaud on his head. He accused


directors of being ‘dictators’, of making the other elements of perform-ance ‘helpless and impotent’, of having ‘reduced them almost to slavery’.Like other avant-garde manifestos for other kinds of theatrical freedom,Dort called for ‘the progressive emancipation of the elements of theatri-cal performance’ (1982: 63–4).

Having examined the emancipation of audience, actor, producer, anddirector from written text, I now turn to an element of theatrical per-formance that seems among the least dramatic. Every performancedepends on material ‘means of symbolic production’, and in perform-ances of a contemporary theatrical kind this means not only a stage butthe props and lighting that help create more dramatic scenes. EarlierI mentioned the performative effect of footlights, how their introductionunderscored the growing sense of a chasm between audience and drama.What the footlights illuminated was, in fact, an only recently darkenedstage. It was the producer Andre Antoine who first thought to extinguishoverhanging houselights in his 1888 production of La Mort du Ducd’Enghien. Jean Chothia calls Antoine’s ‘darkening of the house lights’a ‘significant gesture in the creation of illusionist theatre’ (in Ridout,2006: 49). What lighting illuminates, by creating the illusion of reality,is not just actors but props, an element of great interest in recent theatrescholarship. A decade ago, Marvin Carlson (1989: 8) wrote an influentialessay about ‘the thing-ness of the theatre’. Andrew Sofer (2003) devotedan entire book to ‘transformational props’ that ‘appear to signify inde-pendently of the actor who handles them’ (2003: 24). Scenic objects seemto exemplify icons in the Peircean sense, material objects that literallyresemble the things they are intended to represent. It is this purportedlyiconic quality of drama that interests States (1985) who, drawing atten-tion to ‘the theatre’s special openness to the world of objects’, asserts thattheatre is ‘a language whose words consist . . . of things that are what theyseem to be’ (1985: 20). Asking, ‘What semiotic competence is reallynecessary in theatre?’, Jean Alter (1990) answers: ‘There is only one’,the ‘competence in the use of an iconic code whereby all signs on thestage refer to their mirror image in the imaginary story space outside [the]stage’ (1990: 97).

But these new appreciations for the independence of materiality aretoo literal. It is actually the not-like-the-referent quality of materialthings that makes them ideal stage props. Icons have seductively familiarmaterial surfaces, but their sensual shapes are anchored in invisiblemeanings derived as much from discursive cultural structures as fromplastic form (Alexander, 2008). Props are not only material but symbolic,not so much reflections of ordinary things as translations of dramaticmeanings into material forms. Sofer is careful to explain that it is becausetransformational props can ‘absorb dramatic meaning and become com-plex symbols’ that they are able to ‘motivate the stage action’ (2003: 24).When Peter Handke writes about ‘a brightness that pretends to be

Alexander 17

another brightness’, a ‘light that pretends to be another light’ (in States,1985: 20), he is getting at just such intertwining of material surface andtextual depth.

The Independence of Scenario-Script

If the elements of performance have become liberated, then the text per-formed on stage is not the one printed on the page. Contemporary the-atre has moved far away from intra-textuality. The audience has beensharply separated, and actor, director, producer, and means of symbolicproduction have emerged as efforts to more effectively organize the mise-en-scene on stage. In this context of differentiation, the written playprovides a set of background collective representations, the specificmeanings of which are worked out on the stage. What is foregroundedon stage are scripts. Goffman was the first social theorist to speak ofscripts, but failing to differentiate them from background meanings, heconceived scripts as rigid, non-contingent texts. Influenced by the con-texts of defusion that define modern performance studies, RobinBernstein (2009: 89) has approached the concept more flexibly: ‘Theword script captures the moment when the dramatic narrative and move-ment through space are in the act of becoming each other.’ Bernsteinreferences Taylor’s influential distinction between repertoire and archive(see above), but it is the latter’s concept of ‘scenario’ that actually fits bestwith script. Scenarios are not written, but they are by no means entirelyinvented, either. Taylor (2003) sees them as ‘meaning-making paradigmsthat structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes’(2003: 28). Relatively, not absolutely, independent of written archives,scenarios conjure physical location, cultural codes, and embodiment allat the same time. They allow actors to be culturally pragmatic.

The Playwright Responds

These powerful movements of dramaturgical innovation were, as I havereconstructed them, first and foremost uprisings against textual power,even as they also aimed at becoming separated from each other.However, as the era of defusion deepened, writers of theatrical textsdid not simply stand pat. They, too, were mightily anxious about thegrowing gap between audience and stage. In response, they created newforms of theatrical writing, radically revisionist styles that revived dra-matic impact and addressed directly fears about fragmentation, isolation,and meaningless in the modern age. The late 19th-century Scandinavianplaywrights Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, no matter how melo-dramatic their realism and how antipathetic their personal relations, werethe first self-consciously ‘modern’ stage writers to embark on this quest.In his introduction to the publication of Miss Julie, Strindberg (2000[1888]) decried ‘the serious theatre crisis now prevailing throughout


Europe, especially in those bastions of culture that produced the greatestthinkers of the age, England and Germany’, and he announced that ‘theart of drama, like most of the other fine arts, is dead’ (2000: 371).Criticizing the efforts of his contemporaries as merely filling ‘old formswith new contents’, Strindberg announces he has ‘modernized’ the the-atrical form ‘in accordance with [the] demands I think contemporaryaudiences make upon this art’ (2000: 371). Social realism in 1930s theatre– for example the work of Clifford Odets – elaborated this modernizingresponse on a more politically engaged, working-class oriented form.

Samuel Beckett’s transformation of theatrical style challenged suchefforts at dramatic realism, reinvigorating textual engagement with thepostwar, post-mass-murder world. Doing away with plot and even char-acter, the starkness of Beckett’s scenes and the bleak poetry of his dia-logue powerfully articulated the spirit of the audiences of his time.‘I can’t go on!’ Vladimir exclaims in Waiting for Godot, but he immedi-ately reconsiders. ‘What have I said?’ he asks, and at play’s end he hasdecided to continue to wait. Yet, while extraordinarily innovative withtext, Beckett displayed marked rigidity vis-a-vis the other elements ofperformance, trying to re-fuse roles that had become emancipated, put-ting the writer back into control. Beckett rarely assented to requests forlicensed performance of his plays. When he did so, he exercised totalauthority over the staffing and mise-en-scene, frequently from on-site(Bair, 1978). Here is another demonstration of a paradox we have con-tinually encountered: even as the distinctive elements of performancehave sought independence for themselves, they have often tried to sub-ordinate the others.

IV

There are several related themes I have not taken up here. One is filmicdrama, whether in cinema, TV, or online, and its powerful contributionto the (re)dramatic movement it has been the point of this essay todescribe. The French film theorist and Cahiers du Cinema founderAndre Bazin (1967) rightly insists that, as compared with writing andtheatre, the ontology of film is realism. Virtually every cinematic innov-ation – from montage to animation and 3D, from close-ups to long shotsand panning, from hand-held video cameras to cinema verite, from shortto long form TV – has sought to deepen audience conviction that whatthey are seeing and feeling is vivid and true, if obviously dramaticallydifferent from actual social life.

Another theme moves beyond the theatrical to the fate of the moderndramatic in other arts. Over roughly the same period I have consideredhere, painting and sculpture moved from narrative representation toabstraction as their dominant modality, with music shifting from har-mony to atonality. Did the transition from concreteness and realism push

Alexander 19

these arts to postdrama? Such a case has often been made, but it seems apoor one to me. Pre-and-post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Constructivism,Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop art, con-ceptual art – all these radical innovations of the painterly avant-gardemay be seen not as efforts to create alienation from contemporary art butas techniques for recreating its aura and mystery, for providing moreintensive engagements with the aesthetic (cf. Lash, 2010).

There are social, not only theoretical issues at stake in this argumentabout postdrama. If avant-garde theatre may be conceptualized as post-dramatic, then contemporary society may be theorized merely as spec-tacle, and the story David Foster Wallace tells about Found Dramawould not be a joke at all, but something true. My argument suggests,to the contrary, that Wallace was exactly right to frame his FoundDrama story in an ironic tone. Examining recent performance studies,we have discovered the (re)dramatic to be a powerful theme. These writ-ings demonstrate how the elements that compose theatrical performancehave become separated over the course of the last three centuries. Therationale for each aesthetic liberation has been to reclaim dramaticpower. For each theatrical innovation the argument has been that, byliberating this particular and distinctive form of dramatic power, it willbecome possible to re-fuse the elements of performance.

As I hope to have demonstrated in this essay, if theories about theat-rical and social dramas are mutually reflective, they are also substantivelyintertwined. The techniques and tools of aesthetic artifice enter deeplyinto the institutions and lifeworlds of contemporary society, into strug-gles for power and its vertical operation (Alexander, 2010) and intoefforts to cut power down to size (Mast, 2012; Tognato, 2012).Democratic movements to control power cannot afford to be postdra-matic. Not empty spectacle but the invigorating experience of mythand value is the goal for which both aesthetic and social performancesstrive.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Christopher Grobe for the research and ideas he contributed to thispaper. An early draft was presented to the Meisterklasse at Konstanz University in July

2011.

Notes

1. For an elaboration of this postdramatic-spectacle perspective in contempor-ary aesthetic theory, see Kennedy (2009); for its elaboration in contemporarysocial theory, see Abercrombie and Longhurst (1998).

2. In what became a contentiously public and disciplinary-defining dispute,leading performance-study scholars responded with umbrage to Worthen’scritique (Dolan, 1995; Roach, 1995; Schechner, 1995). Worthen (1998) sub-sequently revised and softened his claims.


3. For empirical cultural-sociological studies demonstrating the social dramaticin modern contexts, see Wagner-Pacifici (1986), Berezin (1997), Edles (1998),Cottle (2004), Reed (2007), Smith (2008), McCormick (2009), Goodman(2010), Eyerman (2011), Norton (2011), Gao (2011), Mast (2012), Tognato(2012), and Ringmar (2013).

4. In commenting upon Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, Freud articulated the samefusion of textual figuration with audience in psychological terms: ‘The poet isat the same time compelling us to recognize our inner minds, in which thesesame impulses though suppressed are to be found’ (in Bennett, 1997: 36).

5. David Lodge (2004) and Colm Toibın (2004) provide barely fictionalizedreconstructions of the hopes and failures of this illustrative stage of James’swriting career.

References

Abercrombie N and Longhurst B (1998) Audiences: A Sociological Theory ofPerformance and Imagination. London: SAGE.

Alexander JC (2004) Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritualand strategy. Sociological Theory 22(4): 527–573.

Alexander JC (2008) Iconic experience in art and life: Surface/depth beginningwith Giacometti’s ‘Standing Woman’. Theory, Culture & Society 25(5): 1–19.

Alexander JC (2010) The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and theDemocratic Struggle for Power. New York: Oxford.

Alexander JC (2011) Performance and Power. Cambridge: Polity Press.Alexander JC (2013) The Dark Side of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.Alexander JC and Mast J (2006) Introduction: Symbolic action in theory and

practice: The cultural pragmatics of symbolic action. In: Alexander JC,Giesen B and Mast J (eds) Social Performances. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Alexander JC, Giesen B and Mast J (eds) (2006) Social Performance: SymbolicAction, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Alter J (1990) A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press.

Aristotle (2000) The Poetics. In: Gerould D (ed) Theatre/Theory/Theatre: TheMajor Critical Texts. New York: Applause Books.

Artaud A (2000 [1938]) The theatre and its double. In: Gerould D (ed) Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts. New York: Applause Books.

Auslander P (1997) From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism andPostmodernism. London: Routledge.

Bair D (1978) Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace,Jovanovich.

Baker SA (2010) Imitating art or life: The tragic hero’s emergence on France’spostcolonial stage. In: Wilson K (ed) Looking at Ourselves: Multiculturalism,Conflict & Belonging. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Bazin A (1967) What Is Cinema? Berkeley: University of California Press.Bennett S (1997) Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception

(Second Edition). London: Routledge.

Alexander 21

Berezin M (1997)Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy.Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Bernstein R (2009) Dances with things: Material culture and the performance ofrace. Social Text 101(4): 67–94.

Boal A (2000 [1974]) Theatre of the oppressed. In: Gerould D (ed) Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts. New York: Applause Books.

Brecht B (2000 [1937]) Alienation effects in Chinese acting. In: Gerould D (ed)Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts. New York: ApplauseBooks.

Brook P (1968) The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum.Carlson M (1989) The iconic stage. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

3(2): 3–18.Chaikin J (l972) The Presence of the Actor. New York: Atheneum.Chaudhuri U (1984) The spectator in drama/drama in the spectator. Modern

Drama XXVII(3): 281–298.Corneille P (2000 [1660]) Of the three unities of action, time, and place.

In: Gerould D (ed) Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts. NewYork: Applause Books.

Cottle S (2004) The Racist Murder of Stephen Lawrence: Media Performance andPublic Transformation. London: Praeger.

Craig G (2000 [1907]) The actor and ubermarionette. In: Gerould D (ed)Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts. New York: ApplauseBooks.

Diderot D (2000 [1773–8]) The paradox of acting. In: Gerould D (ed) Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts. New York: Applause Books.

Dolan J (1995) Responses to W.B. Worthen’s ‘Disciplines of the Text/Sites ofPerformance’. The Drama Review 39(1): 28–35.

Dolan J (2005) Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.

Dort B (1982) The liberated performance. Modern Drama XXI(1): 60–68.Edles L (1998) Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy

after Franco. New York: Cambridge University Press.Eyerman R (2011) The Cultural Sociology of Political Assassination: From MLK

and RFK to Fortyn and van Gogh. New York: Palgrave.Fish S (1980) Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Gao R (2011) Revolutionary trauma and representation of the war: The case of

China in Mao’s era. In: Alexander JC, Breese E and Eyerman R (eds)Narrating Trauma. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Gerould D (ed) (2000) Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts. NewYork: Applause Books.

Goodman T (2010) Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in the New SouthAfrica. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Grotowski J (2002 [1968]) Towards a Poor Theatre, ed. Barba E. New York:Routledge.

Handke P (1971) ‘Offending the Audience’ and ‘Self-Accusation’. London:Methuen.

Hodge A (ed) (2000) Twentieth Century Actor Training. London: Routledge.


Hodge A (2000) Introduction. In: Hodge A (ed) Twentieth Century ActorTraining. London: Routledge.

James H (1936 [1889]) The Tragic Muse. New York: Scribners.Kael P (1968) Orson Welles: There ain’t no way. In: Kael P (ed) Kiss Kiss Bang

Bang. Boston: Little, Brown.Kennedy D (2009) The Spectator and the Spectacle: Audiences in Modernity and

Postmodernity. New York: Cambridge University Press.Krasner D (2000) Strasberg, Adler and Meisner: Method acting. In: Hodge A

(ed) Twentieth Century Actor Training. London: Routledge.Lash S (2010) Intensive Culture: Social Theory, Religion, and Contemporary

Capitalism. London: SAGE.Lehmann H (2006 [1999]) Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge.Lodge D (2004) Author, Author. New York: Viking.Mast J (2012) The Performative Presidency: Crisis and Resurrection during the

Clinton Years. New York: Cambridge University Press.McCormick L (2009) Higher, faster, louder: Representations of the international

music competition. Cultural Sociology 3(1): 5–30.Muse JH (2010) Flash mobs and the diffusion of the audience. Theatre 40(3):

1–24.Norton M (2011) A structural hermeneutics of ‘The O’Reilly Factor’. Theory

and Society 40(3): 315–346.Pavis P (1982) Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre.

New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.Phelan P (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. New York: Routledge.Ranciere J (2009) The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso.Rayner A (1994) To Act, to Do, to Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of

Action. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Reed I (2007) Why Salem made sense: Culture, gender, and the Puritan perse-

cution of witchcraft. Cultural Sociology 1(2): 209–234.Ridout N (2006) Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems.

New York: Cambridge University Press.Ringmar E (2013) Liberal Barbarism and the European Destruction of the

Summer Palace. New York: Palgrave.Roach J (1995) Responses to W.B. Worthen’s ‘Disciplines of the Text/Sites of

Performance’. The Drama Review 39(1): 35–36.Roach J (2007) It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Schechner R (1988) Victor Turner’s last adventure. In: Turner V (ed) The

Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications.Schechner R (1995) Responses to W.B. Worthen’s ‘Disciplines of the Text/Sites

of Performance’. The Drama Review 39(1): 36–38.Schechner R (2002 [1982]) Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York:

Routledge.Smith P (2008) Punishment and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Sofer A (2003)The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press.States B (1985) Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of

Theatre. Berkeley: University of California Press.Strindberg A (2000 [1888]) Preface to Miss Julie. In: Gerould D (ed) Theatre/

Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts. New York: Applause Books.

Alexander 23

Taylor D (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory inthe Americas. Durham: Duke University Press.

Tognato C (2012) Central Bank Independence: Cultural Codes and SymbolicPerformance. New York: Palgrave.

Toibın C (2004) The Master. New York: Scribner.Wagner-Pacifici R (1986) The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Wallace DF (2009) Infinite Jest. New York: Little, Brown.Williams R (1983) Drama in a dramatized society. In: Williams R (ed)Writing in

Society. London: Verso.Worthen WB (1995) Disciplines of the text/sites of performance. The Drama

Review 39(1): 13–28.Worthen WB (1998) Drama, performativity, and performance. PMLA 113(5):

1093–1107.

Jeffrey C Alexander is Professor and Chair of the Department ofSociology at Yale University and co-editor of Sociological Theory.Recent books include The Dark Side of Modernity (Polity, 2013) andTrauma: A Social Theory (Polity, 2012).


DOI: 10.1177/0263276413506019 Society: Social Theory and ... Articles/2014_Alexander_The...the...

Documents

Transcript of DOI: 10.1177/0263276413506019 Society: Social Theory and ... Articles/2014_Alexander_The...the...